Technology Blog

Now with Core i5 and i7 CPU’s and other improvements-

13″ MacBook Pro
- 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, NVIDIA GeForce 320M, 4 GB RAM, 250 GB hard drive
- 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo, NVIDIA GeForce 320M, 4 GB RAM, 320 GB hard drive

15″ MacBook Pro
- 2.4 GHz Core i5, Intel HD Graphics and NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M with 256MB, 4 GB RAM, 320 GB hard drive
- 2.53 GHz Core i5, Intel HD Graphics and NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M with 256MB, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB hard drive
- 2.66 GHz Core i7, Intel HD Graphics and NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M with 512MB, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB hard drive

17″ MacBook Pro
- 2.53 GHz Core i5, Intel HD Graphics and NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M with 512MB, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB hard drive

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/

Here at Analogue we took the SSD plunge, splashed out on an Apple branded Toshiba 2.5″ 256GB SSD drive for R&D.

The results are outstanding!

The Apple branded units come pre-configured in a case to fit into your MacBook/Pro laptop, other manufacturers do supply a generic ‘case’ or drive mounting system to fit most laptops.

So it was just a simple clone from my old Seagate 2.5″ 7200rpm 320GB boot drive, CarbonCopyCloner took care of this in a few hours, half an hour to open laptop and install into my 2008 MacBookPro 2.4Ghz.

Right away you can feel the speed and response, it makes quite a difference to boot time, GUI response, application launch and overall snappiness of the machine. Battery life is definitely increased but hard to quantify, heat is slightly lower especially on this model as it is a notoriously a hot laptop.

SSD has now come of age, in the past, size, speed and cost were prohibitive but we are approaching the sweet spot , yes they are still expensive at the moment but this cost will reduce as time goes by.

So on to the geek stuff, I ran a series of benchmarks on various configurations, here are the results-

MacBook Pro 2008 model

2.4Ghz 4GB RAM

256GB SSD drive, specs-

I used Helios LAN test to test drive read/write speeds across a few Mac’s with various drives.

MacBook Pro 256GB SSD results-

MacBook Pro 120GB SATA HDD results-

Xserve 500GB SATA HDD results-

I also ran XBench and compared it to other similar hardware with SATA standard drives, results-

http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=431864&doc2=431521

Drive speeds at the bottom of page.

This is the way the world is moving, already major manufacturers are offering SSD options and Apple now have an SSD boot option for 2009 Xserve’s.

Other SSD manufacturers have offerings which are faster than the unit we tested, they can get quite pricey though…

Apple have announced new laptop hardware-

SD Slot

Firewire 800 in 13″ range (hooray)

New battery specs (we will see on this one)

Up to 2.8Ghz CPU

Officially supported 8GB RAM

MacBook 13″ now MacBookPro 13″

256GB SSD option

MB Air to be updated too.

Live feeds here-

http://live.gizmodo.com/

http://www.macrumorslive.com/

Static pages-

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/06/08/apple_unveils_faster_more_affordable_macbook_pros.html

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/06/08/apple_introduces_13_inch_macbook_pro_cheaper_macbook_airs.html